It’s Been a Long, Strange Time Coming

Sometimes, the longer it takes to earn an accomplishment, the sweeter it is when finally attained.

Nearly a full year ago, as I was finishing up the last achievement required to claim my beautiful Violet Proto-Drake, I hit a brick wall in the form of the School of Hard Knocks. Things seemed to be going fine overall right up until Arathi Basin was all the stood between me and my drake. A little refresher to your memories, for those who don’t remember my original rant:

Then, there came Arathi Basin. For the wee hours up until the official end of Children’s Week, it was the bane of my existence. The flow of things basically went like this: Queue; wait an hour; join up with a group composed entirely of members who also need to assault a flag in order to get their achievement; get pwned by a premade that 5-caps before even half of us catch our needed break; get killed because my orphan gives away my stealthiness; start over again. Humiliating.

After a year of cooling off, I decided not to take my chances this year with the coming of Children’s Week. I hopped back into the fray quickly on Sunday, first grabbing myself a new orphan, then queuing back up for AB. I painfully realized that I have squat for Cataclysm PvP gear, and that my Level 80 PvP set would make me take more of an HP hit than was probably worth it. But I have to work with what I’ve got — Level 85 questing gear, it is.

The first two times, I thought I may have a repeat of last year, but this time because of insane latency. My first shot back in the battleground was so incredibly plagued by latency that it actually froze the game entirely, before disconnecting me. When I was able to log back in, I was presented with that dreadful deserter debuff. I decided to wait for some Patching to finish before hopping back in again.

Second time around: same thing, although this time the game took pity and didn’t punish me for my horrible lag with another debuff. The Patch had finished, but after looking into the problem, it seemed to be an issue with addons. So I disabled all nonessentials, and tried once more.

Third time was a charm.

I didn’t cap the flag in the first immediate approach, but I was able to strategically reach lumber mill when, somehow, no one else was around. Grabbed the cap, got the achievement, cheered, and kept on playing. I think it must have been the nerves in combination with the opposition last time around — I don’t PvP much but somehow I was able to grab Disgracin’ the Basin. Though, probably, a large part of that had to do with the fact that I put away the orphan after the first cap and was able to rely a bit more on stealth.

I’m still not a fan of the required achievement for the meta, less because of its difficulty for non PvPers and more because it turns into a week of hellish battlegrounds for those who actually want to do something other than the requirement for the achievement. But either way, it feels good to have finally achieved what I set out two years ago to do – earn my violet Proto-Drake. She’s a beauty.

Is anyone else taking another gander at Children’s Week for the new pets Snail Shell or Legs?